Category: Thought

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” second essay from Essays (1847 edition).

Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known & seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper & sufficient antagonist to error.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (October 1776), published in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson : 1816–1826(1899) edited by Paul Leicester Ford, v. 2, p. 102.

I think that email was best interpreted as a performance review — but actually it was a pulse check review. “Do you have a pulse? Do you have a pulse and two neurons?” So if you have a pulse and two neurons you can reply to an email. This is, I think, not a high bar, is what I’m saying.

Anyone could accomplish this.

But what we are trying to get to the bottom of is: we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why the can’t respond. And some people who are not real people. Like they’re literally fictional individuals.

Elon Musk, about his DOGE request of all federal government employees to respond to the email with five things they accomplished during the week. Accessed on The Rubin Report, February 27, 2025.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), chapter 3.

The discovery that one cannot convince an opponent and that it is hopeless to go on trying involves a confession of subjectivity that deprives the world of meaning.

Mary McCarthy, The Oasis (1949).

The untold story mothers the lie.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994).

The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.

Joanna Russ, Existence (1975).

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), chapter 22.

Socialist states like North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba and others consider feminism to be petit bourgeois and as a consequence give women few roles in life- mother or whore. For example, red light areas in Vietnam the left claimed during the war were there because of GI’s being there, have grown to incredible miles of streets. Cuba has all ages prostitution to make up for the lack of upward mobility for women in society. Once you go socialist, women are the first losers. So why would women in any society want socialism?

Because like “fascist,” they make up their own meaning of what socialist is.

Michael Flores, “Trump’s Populist Moment,” Substack: Civil and Global Defense (February 15, 2025).

Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, “here and now” without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank. And culture, which is but its interpretation, cannot wait any more than can life itself.

José Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University [Misión de la Universidad (1930; translation © 1944, first published 1946), p. 73, translated by Howard Lee Nostrand.